Bandit

by Molly Brodak

  Now there were casinos downtown. Before you’d have to go to Windsor, which wasn’t such a bad thing, and in fact back then the exchange rate would give you a leg up anyway. But now the casinos were here, and they were so easy. My sister told me he bragged about being able to punch in at work and leave to go play blackjack at the casino. If he wasn’t back in time to punch out a coworker would punch out for him. It was routine.

  I moved around, into my own places, and transferred to Oakland University in Rochester, the city where I was born. After seven years of working on a bachelor’s degree, switching majors and schools more often than was reasonable, I realized I would never be able to work full-time and finish school at OU just because of scheduling conflicts, so I quit my job and moved in with my sister and Dad just so I could graduate. By that time he pretty much lived with his girlfriend, although he always kept some things there in his room. I didn’t see him much. Even my sister said he was hard to pin down. Despite this, he was demanding, especially when it came to fulfilling obligations. If there was a Brodak family picnic or wedding, we were expected to be there. I would try to make it but didn’t make the efforts my sister made. She seemed badgered by him, unhappy and anxious. He made a good salary but there never seemed to be enough; besides, his retirement was coming up and of course he did not have the savings other men had at this point in their lives.

  He had a strange black jewelry box I liked to look in. It was full of old foreign money, some photos of women, unidentifiable teeth, little chains, and rings. All mysteries. My sister said she saw betting slips around but I didn’t see them, I never knew what they looked like. I saw stacks of bills sometimes, his neatly penciled block letters showing how much he paid on each one. I saw he was paying restitution to the government for the robberies.

  Soon I graduated and moved to an apartment in Fern-dale, a suburb just on the north side of 8 Mile Road, across from Detroit proper.

  As he neared his retirement age, GM offered him a buyout. He would get $62,000 (a figure he would later minimize in a letter to me) plus a nice pension afterward. He took it. This was how it ended for him.

  48

  Dad and my sister were OK for a while, back to being a little family. They went to church together, played euchre together at a regular game, went to Red Wings games, and hosted barbeques. I saw them almost as they were before: a sort of unbalanced couple, but happy, choosing each other still, like family does. He could have just gone on like this, retired with a normal life, and with everyone’s forgiveness.

  But money in his hands was dangerous, especially a large chunk like his retirement buyout. First he had to pay back my sister $20,000. He’d stolen two blank cash advance checks from her credit line that had come in the mail and cashed them both, ten grand each, forging her signature. He told her later, when she got the bill, that it was for an emergency and he’d had no time to ask her. He insisted on saying that he did not “steal” the money from her, only borrowed it. He wouldn’t say where the money went, which meant it went to bookies.

  He had also stolen her social security number and opened credit cards in her name, but paid them off so she didn’t even know until much later. He did it to me too, but only once. I didn’t have the spotless credit my sister had, not worth stealing; it was just a gas card with a low limit that I found later on my credit report. Soon he kept asking me for the title to my car, “just to have the paperwork on file.” I stalled and stalled; I knew he wanted to pawn the title. I knew it wouldn’t have been worth that much, which made it all the more heartbreaking. He must have been desperate. He filed for bankruptcy a few months before the last crime. He was denied. They said he made too much money.

  My sister was concerned for him, and I felt her concern. She was stressed again, like she’d been as a child. I felt helpless, but I kept in touch with her, as a listener, a supporter. I suggested she start thinking about the next step in case something happened to him.

  “Oh yes,” I remember her saying, “I have a secret savings account he doesn’t know about.” Just like a spouse waiting for the other shoe to drop. She saw him sliding away from normalcy and she’d been arming herself. Myself, I did what I always did when things were bad: keep quiet, watch carefully. I took my sudden stomach pain, which would later be diagnosed as ulcers that still plague me, as a pretty unequivocal sign of some bottled-up anxiety over what was surely coming our way.

  He had gambled away all of the money from the buyout within three months. On the weekends he’d sleep for a few hours at home in the morning, then leave for twenty-four-hour-long stretches at the casino. He’d come home and sleep for a few hours in the morning, then start again. His car was repossessed. He tried to hide it from my sister by telling her that it was in the shop, but eventually she was getting phone calls from bill collectors. Soon from the mortgage company. The money she’d been paying him for “rent” had not been going toward the mortgage; in fact, it was three months behind.

  He fought with his girlfriend constantly, shuttling between her house and “his” house to sleep, spending all of his time at work or the casino. My sister knew what was coming. She told him, explicitly, in a straight, plain way I could not imagine myself doing with him, to not commit any crimes. She said “just please don’t do anything stupid.”

  She said he looked at her with extreme hatred at that moment. “Don’t tell me about my business,” he said. “I am your father.”

  She told him she would help him if he was just straight with her, and tell her what was going on. Then the anger turned into a dismissive chuckle. He waved her off and left again. My sister would have, and could have, just handed him all the money he needed if he had just told her the truth.

  When we were kids, my sister showed me the notes he left her when he’d secretly steal all of her saved-up allowance out of her jewelry box. The money would be replaced by plain slips of paper with “I.O.U.” written in large letters and the amount underneath. “$37.” “$24.” “$88.” When he was arrested the first time, he owed her $5,000, all stolen, in secret, out of her jewelry box.

  49

  Maybe private worlds are all there are. Talking about them is a way of conjuring gravity between them, a way to pull them near and make them matter to each other. I mean, to make any one of them matter at all. Certainly the force of describing them also changes them.

  But it can’t be better to say nothing.

  Everyone lives alone in families. Everyone goes alone into action, love, and work. Sometimes, it’s why we work. Everyone goes alone into sickness, too.

  50

  “Scrub extra hard,” the nurse said, “y’aint going bathe again for a while.”

  She handed me a thin stitch of soap and papery blue booties and a papery blue dress. I shut the door to the cavernous shower stall and scrubbed extra hard.

  It was five in the morning, and very dark in surgery intake. I emerged in my paper clothes, calm and flat, used to hospital procedures at that point, without marvel. I set myself onto a bed where I’d stay for the whole summer, headless.

  They started in with the IVs, and no matter how much I told each new nurse that my veins are thin and rolly and likely to blow, each new nurse tried it her way until it failed. This time, through a multi-poked failure patch, she found a vein that rolled as soon as she punctured it and a jet of blood spurted from my arm onto the chest of my plus one, my boyfriend at the time, who promptly fainted.

  Then I was officially alone. The anesthesiologist came in, chubby and glowing like a movie star, and she told me to start counting back from ten. Cold crept up my arm and then I woke up.

  The seven-hour surgery to remove the tumor that had been growing behind my eyes and the small coma afterward, where no one went, especially not me, was not even a tick-tock, just a tick-and then someone telling me it had happened.

  Like when I was told I was losing my vision and I was weirdly lactating because I had a brain tumor, pea-sized, pressing on my optic nerve, growing into my pituitary gla
nd. This two weeks before I’d leave for grad school. Not cancer, just a cellular malfunction, she called it—stubborn cells, stubbornly not disappearing but huddling up. I was told, I was shown. See there? That bit, you know, he tapped the MRI image. I saw but did not know.

  A cellular malfunction: no purpose, no meaning, no particular intent. When I was told, I saw the Flower Sermon but Buddha holding up not a meaningless wordless flower for no one to understand except Mahākāśyapa, but a small pea-sized, scallop-edged, rubbery tumor. For no one to understand, period.

  My mom, my sister, my grandparents, and my then-boyfriend rallied around me when we found out. My grandpa scoured the Internet for reasons why this happened to me, and would call with suggestions: Birth control pills? Illegal drugs? Pent-up psychic energy? Cell-phone radiation? There was no reason, the doctor insisted. No reason: the worst reason of all.

  Dad heard about it from my sister. It had been about two years since his buyout, and since I’d left for graduate school. I just never saw him anymore; even when I was home visiting, he wasn’t around. I know this is no excuse; I could have called him to tell him about my tumor. But I didn’t. We didn’t talk about it. He didn’t call me when he heard about it; he didn’t say a word.

  Now in my MFA program, I grew my brain tumor in private. I went to class, wrote poems, walked up and down the big West Virginia hills. I lived with my symptoms in secret, adapting to tunnel vision, dabbing lactation away on bathroom breaks. I mostly told no one. I was fine. And not. Like most people.

  Friends I grew close to would learn the two heavy things: dad bank robber, such an interesting story; brain tumor, interesting story, how sad. I had a script for them now and I knew about how long it took to have these conversations. I had a certain way and pace for explaining these things, details managed thoughtfully, calm flat tone meant to deflect pity, the smiles, our mutual amazement, and bright gratitude to prove I did not pity myself. I was fine, I insisted, others had it worse, I was lucky in fact; I was so lucky.

  Then exactly midway through my three-year MFA program at West Virginia University I woke up from surgery. A bandage sealed over my nostrils, which were stuffed fully with gauze and held open with tiny metal stents. They had cut the bottom connections of my nostrils open a bit to widen the passage for the laser that would enter my sinus, pierce through my skull, and sear the tumor into bits to be removed with a tiny grasping claw. The old Egyptian mummification process—how they’d pull pieces of the brain down through the nose with a hook—that was me; I was the mummy.

  Now on the bed I was awake but I was somewhere new in my body. My head was gone. That I that lived here had moved down and “I” was in my chest and stomach.

  Someone was feeding my missing head small ice chips with a plastic spoon. It struggled with the ice slivers. I wanted to go back to sleep but people kept talking to me, wanting me to eat the ice and nod my head. I could not tell if I was nodding. They wanted me to move my arms. I laughed a little in my guts at their precious concern. I would be a hero if I moved my arms right now, I thought, and lifted one arm up to great acclaim. My arm signaled to me via a new route—more direct. Without head-processing. I felt my arm like you’d feel eyes blink. Close up to self. Blink now. Feel it? Right there. Next to “you.” Special, only, brain-self. Imagine that but in your chest.

  Time passed in uneven chunks, blurry light or dark rooms where someone else was always in charge of my body and its requirements. I was wheeled down a hallway and I heard the nurses joking about the bald shaved spots on my head, which had been outlined in purple marker. Sensors had been attached there for MRIs before the surgery—triangulation, he said; in case they came off, they could be realigned to the markings. “Nice purple rings,” I heard them laugh, I heard it through my intestines.

  My body was left in the ICU for a while. I was crouched in my stomach. Here’s what I did for weeks: I listened.

  I couldn’t see and I couldn’t smell or taste and I couldn’t move much to feel anything. I didn’t know anything about my head but that it was boarded up in gauze and I didn’t live there anymore. But I could hear—all through my body.

  I was patient, content to listen, alert and curious about the sounds in the ICU, beeps and groans, wheels wheeling, a phone ringing, a hissing pump, little ticks, gurgling, shoe squeaks if running happened, pad flaps if walking. I listened intently to the sound of someone’s lungs being sucked dry of fluid at regular intervals. Words imposed grossly over this. Most patients in the ICU are not in a position to do much talking; it was the nurses who would talk. They arched nets of intimate words over my bed, dumb chatter, cruel things sometimes, disgusting stories about patients, explicit sexual exchanges, evil rants, boring small talk, just regular people at work. They worked around me, a deaf empty body, coldly protecting their own energies from the drain it would be to consider anything more than their patient’s physical maintenance. It was OK; I was busy anyway.

  I made games of trying to move each toe or twist my ankles back and forth slowly in regular patterns. I felt the inert power in objecthood, headlessness. It is hard to explain to anyone who hasn’t been headless. It’s quite freeing. My legs had voices. No: my calves, my ankles, my thighs, my feet all had voices. I lived in them. I saw the world out of my ankles.

  What does the world look like out of one’s ankles? It looks a little better, honestly.

  I felt what I could feel with my hands. I edged my hand inward and felt a thin tube taped where a patch of my pubic hair had been shaved off. My arms were stiff and dead from too many punctures and too much stillness; I could not bend my elbows. After the nurses had run out of normal puncture spots on my arms they had moved onto my hands and fingers and my neck. My arms swelled and bruised over yellow and blue. They were tired. And deeply tired of being me: executing my commands, shoveling food to head, holding and turning and writing and hitting. They lay like soft logs and seemed happy, finally sessile.

  Once a nurse sat next to me and talked. Sports, the nice weather I was missing, politics even. I tried hard to nod and smile and make small noises of joy. He then pulled out a foamy white hospitalish ponytail elastic and lifted my head gently with one hand, gathering my disgustingly greasy, dank hair to one side and securing it. “There, I bet that feels better,” he said. I instantly flooded with tears, soaking my face bandages. It felt so good, I wanted to tell him. I had never felt anything as good as that. He left and I fell asleep, grateful. I kept that hair band for a while, to remind me.

  It was, I don’t know, June. I slept, oozed, drooled, and forgot everything about my regular life. I was allowed to exist in this sealed-off space, away from my family, away from even my guilt and anxiety over my family, while my sister remained rooted in the pathway of a freight train.

  Then my feeding tube came out. Some bandages came off. Visitors had brought me photos of themselves standing next to the old me, beaming together in the incorrigible safety of normalcy. I saw my mom and my boyfriend looking down on me with uneasy smiles and I knew that look so well. I remembered looking at my mom in a hospital bed after another suicide attempt. I could now see my own small face laboring to smile at her. I had to look away from my visitors. My vision gradually sharpened. But it was remote, like backward through a telescope. I was in no way connected to the information my eyes were now gathering. Trays of real food were delivered to me like jokes.

  I turned the head to look at them—the hard fried chicken piece and roll and wet green beans—and honestly thought it was a joke. The trays would eventually be removed, replaced with new ones when I was left alone. My mom had come to West Virginia now to help and she’d spoon broth into me, or my boyfriend would when he could get away from work. Otherwise that was that. Chewing endeavors ceased when boyfriend noticed I had chewed straight through a small part of my tongue in attempting to eat some bread he’d given me.

  I was to be moved out of ICU into a regular room. A physical therapist came to move my limbs. She lifted my legs and bent them at the
knee repeatedly, in a goofy staged kick, then cheerily moved on to my sore arms. I groaned to let her know it hurt, surprised at the sound. “You really need some pillows under your arms!” she said, pronouncing “pillows” as “pillers” in the Appalachian style. The catheter came out. I’d have to start walking to the bathroom. “You are young and healthy,” my neurosurgeon said when he came to visit me. “Others have it much worse. You should be walking.” My morphine button was taken away while I was asleep.

  The wires to my head were waking up. I would be lying if I said I was happy to have my head back.

  Pain cleans out worry. It puts you in this second, then the next second, and nowhere else. I know it can make you act mean, but only heads can be mean. I was lucky. I felt rich from decapitation. More advantaged than those still attached to that awful organ. I wasn’t wondering why, why, why anymore, what did I do, how did I grow this tumor, how can I be OK now, will it grow back, it will probably grow back, what what what. Just quietness. Sunk into a ground, a bed, as I had sometimes dreamed, in real liminality now, meshed into a hard space, but not exactly anywhere.

  This coming from the kind of person who had lived, as introverted writers and readers do, almost exclusively in her head, regarding her body largely as an irritating, irrational corporation that demanded constant and utterly unappreciated maintenance. The original me would have much preferred bodilessness, and in luck of all lucks here I was with headlessness instead.

  In the regular room a woman was wheeled in who at first just groaned horribly or slept. Eventually I saw her up and about, an enormous stretch of stitching up one of her legs and running across her scalp. Once she approached my bed and pointed at her scars. “They was looking for the clot!” She said, “God works in mysterious ways!” She said that a lot, annoyingly. Mostly she said that. She’d say it when she woke up. She’d say it when I’d throw up on myself from the meds. I’d lie there with hot vomit on my chest, pulling steadily on the nurse cord, mad. “God works in mysterious ways,” she’d whisper under her breath. She got better, then started asking the nurses for cigarettes and was gone soon after that.